


Muse

by lurkingspecter



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Existential Anxiety, Gen, The Light of Creation - Freeform, Urban Fantasy, Villain Protagonist, set on an alternate version of Earth. sort of., words are magic but in the worst way possible
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-01-23 20:19:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12515748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkingspecter/pseuds/lurkingspecter
Summary: With the help of the Light of Creation, John sees what he believes to be the truth—and he won't rest until everyone else sees it, too.





	1. Fallen Star

The final words of John's speech echoed out over the empty seats of the auditorium. He thought a minute, then started scrawling along the margins of his speech notes. _Pause here, emphasize there…_ He imagined how the people would be laid out before him, how he could best use the space, muttering phrases to himself in different intonations to try them out.

After a while the auditorium doors clicked open, and he looked up to see a woman striding down the middle aisle. He smiled in recognition when she called out to him.

“Hey John, practicing that speech?”

“Yes,” he said, and went back to his notes.

Meredith stopped at the edge of the stage and leaned her arms on it.

“Do you have time to grab dinner, or are you going to be at it for a while?”

He made one last note, put the papers in their correct order, and clipped them together with his pen.

“I was just finishing up. You’ve got somewhere in mind?”

“Yep,” she stepped back from the stage and gestured to the stairs that led down from it with a flourish. “Follow me. I’m driving tonight.”

*

The restaurant was some sort of family-owned Italian place, squeezed between two large chain stores that nearly overshadowed it. After they had sat down at a corner booth—her habitual place, he could tell, by the way that she went straight there to claim it—and ordered their drinks, she jabbed a straw at him accusingly.

“Are you going to stick around for once, or am I going to have to give you the cliffnotes version of the past five years of my life before you run off again?”

“No, take your time,” John said, and paused, watching her fiddle with her menu. “I was going to work my way up to telling you this but, actually, it looks like I’ll be staying here indefinitely. Our alma mater has had a position open to me for a while now, and I’ve decided to take it.”

She looked up from the menu and frowned.

“I thought that you loved traveling. Who are you going to run your mouth off to now?”

“A room full of philosophy undergrads.”

“Hmm.”

She took a sip of her wine and stared at him suspiciously over the rim of the glass.

“You don’t sound happy about this.”

He shrugged.

“It’s not ideal, I’ll admit, but the traveling was becoming stale and I’m getting too old to be on the road all the time.”

“I can’t believe that. You don’t look a day over forty.”

“Liar.”

“Fifty.”

“I’m fifty-three, so that’s faint praise.”

“Okay, then, how about this: you look like a decrepit eighty year old. Happy now?”

He laughed, and opened up his own menu. It was a good excuse to look away from her eyes, which had that piercing, analytical look that he had both missed and dreaded, a look that seemed to suggest that she was staring right through his skull. She studied him a while longer, trying to see if he was hiding something, then sighed in frustration. His poker face was too good.

“Well, at least we’ll be able to see each other more often if you’re here.”

“And I can finally meet your wife.”

She threw up her hands in exasperation.

“Finally! Gods, trying to get the two of you in the same room is impossible, with the way that you both run around the globe.”

They ordered their food and ate in silence for a while. He could tell by her frown that she was debating whether or not she should bring something up, but decided that he shouldn’t push her. Eventually she set her fork down and anxiously played with her napkin instead.

“Did you hear about Callisto?”

“I haven’t been keeping up with the news these past few days,” he said. He looked up from his food and saw her grim expression. “Is it gone?”

“Nearly. They finally gave the order for the people on the last remaining acres of land to evacuate.”

“Gods.”

“Yeah. I can’t believe that they didn’t issue the order sooner.”

She smirked.

“No, wait, actually, I can.”

She picked up the fork again and angrily shoveled pasta into her mouth.

Callisto was an island on the lower border of their country. The rising sea had been nibbling away at its edges for years, and people had slowly moved out as it had done so, but the government had held out hope until the last second that the sea would somehow, miraculously, stop rising. Meredith was a spell-building professor at the college he was speaking at, and she kept up to date on Callisto’s news because she was working with scientists to create a spell that would mitigate the effects of the changing climate. So far, though, the spells were only band-aids—they lasted for a while and inevitably fizzled out. This island’s death was final, definite proof that all she had worked on wasn’t enough.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say it to me, say to all the people who’ve had to abandon their entire lives because the government doesn’t know how to handle this shit.”

She put her face in her hands.

“Gods, sorry, I just—”

“I know.”

She stared at him through her fingers. There was fear in her eyes, now. He realized that she was expecting him to motivate. Right. Yes. That was what he did, supposedly.

“Listen, I know that things look bad, but all we can do is keep pushing. You’ve got no other choice, right? It’s either that or give up, and I know that you’re not the type of person who would ever give up.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Meredith? I do. I absolutely do. You’ve been at this for nearly thirty years and at this point I highly doubt that the world will be able to take you down without a fight.”

“Maybe that’s what I need to do. Just go into Parliament and start swinging at those old fucks.”

John smiled.

“We _are_ the old fucks now.”

She laughed.

“You know what I mean—the bad old fucks. We’re the good old fucks.”

She was half-smiling now, but didn’t look quite convinced. He grasped for something more substantial.

“And there’s always the colony. We’ve got to place some faith in that.”

“Right! Yeah, there’s always the colony.”

Meredith was smarter than that. She knew that it would be ages before the space colony, established within the last decade by a coalition of governments, was able to hold a significant amount of people, and that the rich and the able would be the first to get sent there. It was a flimsy comfort.

It was nice to hear someone else say it, though.

Meredith gulped down the rest of her wine and stood up.

“On that note, it’s time for me leave. I’ve got an evening class to teach.”

John touched her arm and she paused, raising her eyebrows at him.

“You’re not going to drive now, are you?”

She rolled her eyes.

“No, dummy, _you’re_ driving.”

With that, she threw him her keys and strolled away—and as if he had been waiting for just this moment, the waiter showed up with the bill.

John sighed, payed the waiter, and followed her into the parking lot.

*

John pulled into the driveway of his house and, as usual, paused for a minute and watched the windows. Every time he looked inside he expected to see someone else living there, someone who would look outside and wonder why a strange man had parked in their driveway. As the light from his headlamps moved across the curtains he always got the impression that someone had just pulled them back into place.

Inside, he was greeted by the stacks of boxes in his living room; he had pulled them out of storage when he moved back in a week ago and was putting off unpacking all but the essentials. He took off his suit jacket and set his speech notes down on the kitchen counter, but was at a loss for what else to do. He went to the fridge, remembered that he had already eaten (and that there was nothing in the fridge), paced around the kitchen jingling his keys, paused when he realized what he doing, set the keys down. Sat down at the kitchen table. Poured himself a glass of water, sat down again. Listened to the silence.

There was too much silence. Too much silence, and too much space. He was used to one-bed hotel rooms and neighbors who stomped on the floor above until dawn.

He turned on the TV, just for something to listen to, and that helped a little. The show currently playing was about the colony on Helena, the nearest planet. It was essentially a reality TV show, even though it was generally marketed as a documentary, and the governments involved in the project tried to make sure that it remained that way—they only let it run because they needed the funding from the networks that were hosting it, and they would cut it in an instant if they could. The networks tried to juice the situation for all the drama that it could provide, but generally things didn’t get any more heated than two scientists having a bland debate over a theory that they disagreed on. Right now a geologist was discussing the soil samples she had brought in for testing that day, and the monotony of her words made for perfect background noise.

He let that keep playing in the background while he went to his bedroom. He had been taking the rooms one at a time; dusting, moving aside filmy cobwebs, whisking the white sheets off the furniture, rediscovering old things that he had long ago discarded and forgotten. The other rooms were clean now, but this was the only one that was in use. There was a bookshelf, a desk, a bed, a wardrobe, and a suitcase full of clothes that he had only half unpacked—the clothes that he had taken out were ironed and perfectly arranged in the wardrobe, though. He would never let himself leave the house with a wrinkled collar.

He peered into the suitcase, wondering if he could convince himself to take out anything else. John had generally traveled light without a lot of furnishings, but there was one thing that he had taken everywhere: a photograph of his college friends, caught unaware by someone. Meredith had been telling the group a story and she was gesticulating enthusiastically, her eyes bright with laughter. Nearest to her were John and his ex-boyfriend Sidney, who had his arm around John’s waist and was, John remembered, about to playfully mess up his hair. John generally didn’t unpack this until he knew for certain that he would be staying somewhere for a while. He set it on the one empty corner of his desk, against the wall where it wouldn’t fall over.

With that settled, he began picking through the various other things on top of the desk. There was a stack of the latest issues of philosophy journals, skimmed through but otherwise hardly touched, and he gave these due consideration before sliding them onto the floor. He had seemingly been through everything that philosophy, past and current, had to offer, and was moving on to other places. First he had looked through scientific and magical texts, as far as his limited knowledge of those fields would allow, and now he was studying religious texts, trying to see what views they had to offer about the meaning of life.

The current thing he was reading was a dense anthology of myths, one of those scholarly texts where footnotes take up half the page. At this point he had read three different versions of a myth about a beast that devoured the sun, and so far this didn’t seem at all relevant to what he was looking for, but he had to keep reading just in case. He grabbed a pen, opened it up to the page he had left off on, and dug in. While he was reading he scribbled in the notepad that he kept with him specifically for thoughts on this subject.

_Devouring sun = Search for vitality_

_Devouring sun = Fear of death by some sudden catastrophe_

_Devouring sun = Awe of nature, awe of forces outside of one’s control_

His mind kept wandering from the book and returning to his conversation with Meredith.

The sun. Catastrophe. Gods, he didn’t need any reminders about that right now.

He closed the book and opted to flip through his notes instead—and that still wasn’t enough, so he pulled out all the previous notebooks he had worked with, which were lined up in a neat row on his bookshelf, and spread them out over his desk. He got out a highlighter and tried to find words and phrases that came up in his thoughts over and over again, searching for any connections that he could make that way. His notebooks were already filled with similar markings—the oldest notebooks were a rainbow of colors inside, so bright that they would be jarring to anyone who wasn’t used to them, and even he wasn’t sure where his train of thought had been headed half the time.

Sun, moon, light, stars. Medieval astronomers had believed that people’s lives were governed by the movements of the stars. It was nonsense. He was willing to try anything, though. He got out a blue highlighter—blue for cold, uncaring stars, because he couldn’t think of the stars as anything but far-removed and impersonal—and set to work, expecting to make a night of it.

John would sit up for hours in the morning with the lamp still burning and incoherent thoughts flying around in his mind. He would wake up with ink-stained hands and pages of scrawled words but still be no closer to the Truth. If you asked any of his friends, they would say that John didn’t think that the truth was worth pursuing, that it would only make you miserable, that you would live your best life if you forgot about all those big questions that had you clutching your blankets and sweating at three in the morning. And that was was exactly what John wanted everyone else to do—forget about it. Put on your best smile, shove down that dread, and grasp whatever tiny thing gave your life meaning.

He couldn’t do that, though. Contemplating the dread _was_ what gave his life meaning. As long as he kept swimming toward it, he wouldn’t drown.

Lately, though, he was starting to feel like there wasn’t much point, in either the motivational speaking or his own private search for some greater meaning. Sometimes, when he was speaking, he felt like Nero fiddling away as Rome burned—the fiddling was what people needed, it seemed, but in the long run he wasn’t sure how much good it would do any of them.

He looked up from _I defy you, stars!,_ rubbed his eyes, and glanced at the clock on his desk. 9:00 PM. Far, _far_ too much time until morning.

He ignored the rest of the notebooks and listened to the murmur of the television down the hall. Now that he had gotten used to that, the heavy silence was creeping back in.

Home wasn’t making him feel better. He had thought that being back here would dispel some of the ennui, but it hadn’t; it had moved in with him here just like every other place that he had inhabited over his years of traveling. This felt like just another liminal space.

John switched his slacks and dress shoes for jeans and tennis shoes, pulled on a jacket, grabbed his keys, and went outside. As he started his car he wracked his brain for places to go. During college he had known every nook and cranny of this city, but now that knowledge had faded. There was one spot, however, which was forever stuck in his mind as his main insomniac haunt—the forest outside of town. Maybe the familiarity would help him. Maybe it would remind him why he had thought that coming back here was a good idea in the first place.

He drove out into the darkened streets and let long-dormant memories guide him.

*

As John pulled out his flashlight and swept the beam over the entrance to the hiking trail, it occurred to him that maybe this wasn’t the safest idea. He had walked around weirder places on an insomniac impulse before, though, so he didn’t see any reason to stop at this. The worst thing that you were likely to find in these woods at night were kids from the local college standing around a fire pit and smoking weed.

And, honestly, in his current frame of mind he wasn’t too worried about his personal safety.

He locked his car, which was parked by the side of the road on a stretch of gravel, and set off down the path.

It was a clear night with a waxing, nearly full moon above the trees, and he spent more time gazing up at the stars than he did at the path ahead of him. It was the end of fall and the barest hint of cool weather was just now starting to creep across the land. Winter didn’t last long, these days; they would be lucky to get two months of it. Some years he believed that it was never going to come, but he could feel it now in the wind that blew through the leaves, making them stir with a sound like whispering. That was reassuring, at least. The seasons were still changing. The world wasn’t completely falling apart just yet.

This silence wasn’t like the silence at home; it was a thick silence, multi-layered, filled with the rustling of plants and insect noises and the distant sound of cars on the freeway. It was calm, but nothing was still, and he felt as if there was movement all around him, invisible in the darkness. This was a silence that he could settle into.

Then he glanced off the path and saw, in the distance, a light in the darkness.

He briefly turned off his flashlight to be sure, and yes, that was what it was, a light far away from the path. At first he thought that it must have been another insomniac hiker, but the light was too diffuse to be a flashlight. Maybe it was a lamp, then—but no, that wasn’t it either. Maybe someone was using magic to light their path?

Before he could register that he was moving, John found that he had taken several steps off of the path. He frowned at the light. No, this was bad idea, it would be better to just leave whoever it was alone and hope that they did the same.

And yet…

John kept going toward it.

The woods got brighter as he got closer to it, until he didn’t even need his flashlight to see. John pushed through the bracken and into a small clearing. In the middle of that clearing, nestled among the vibrant new plant growth that had grown up around it, was a light. He didn’t know any other way to describe it—it was simply light in the shape of a sphere. Despite its strength, the light wasn’t harsh, and there was a quality about it that was soft and inviting. As he was drawn toward it, hypnotized by its splendor and strangeness, he felt lulled.

 _I’m not a threat_ , it seemed to be saying. _I just want to be held, and held by you._

John paused before picking it up. He had some rudimentary magic skill, but he didn't know enough to figure out what sort of magic this was. The longer he studied it, though, the more that he became convinced that it wasn’t magic, or at least not the type of magic that most wizards used. He poked it with a stick, half expecting that the stick would crumble to ash, but nothing happened. He picked it up and held it lightly, ready to drop it if it did something.

It felt as if it weighed nothing, and yet he was interacting with it like a real physical object, so there must have been something solid in there. It was like holding sunshine, but it wasn’t warm—moonlight, then. He held it up to the sky for comparison.

“Did you come from up there?”

It didn’t respond, of course, and John didn’t realize that he had been expecting a response until he didn’t hear one. There was something strangely vital about it, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear it speak.

“Well, if you did come from up there, then…no, that can’t be.”

John knew of myths in which gods dropped stars from the sky and left them for humans to find and, inevitably, muck up the world with—however, even though he had no doubt that the gods were real, from what he could tell accounts of their involvement were usually highly exaggerated. If a god had ever flung a star from the heavens, it had been a long, long time.

 _If_ this was a similar scenario, though…John shivered, not letting himself finish the thought. He glanced at the patch of overgrown vegetation, and then back at the Light again.

John put the unneeded flashlight in his jacket pocket, held the Light in front of him to light the way, and started back toward the path.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, thanks for making it to the end of this thing! I'm aiming to post at least one chapter of this per month.


	2. Eternity

John set the Light down on the coffee table in his living room.

It looked even more strange inside his house, next to his mundane furniture. On the way home he had put his jacket over it, and that had cloaked the light well enough. No one had noticed. He wasn’t going to try that again, though—it was better to keep it inside and away from prying eyes for now.

John switched the TV over to the news channel and was instantly greeted by the grainy image of a light falling from the sky. The camera wobbled slightly as the person holding it let out a shout of surprise. This was followed by several other videos, steadier and slightly clearer, filmed by government surveillance cameras.

At the top of the screen, overlaid on all of these videos, were these words: CONFIRMED UFO SIGHTING.

John smiled. “UFO” seemed like a crude word for the ethereal object in front of him, but at least it confirmed his suspicions: it _did_ come from the sky. What made him nervous, though, was the ticker at the bottom of the screen: “If you know anything, please call this number.”

Somehow, John had managed to take the Light before the authorities showed up. That didn’t mean that someone hadn’t noticed him leaving, though. He glanced outside, saw that the street was empty, and closed all the curtains. There was nothing else he could do. If someone showed up to take it, then that would be that. He would just have to get what he could out of the Light while he had it.

Where to begin, though?

“Is there any way that you can communicate with me?”

Nothing. John cleared his throat, beginning to feel a little silly.

“Two blinks for no, one for yes?”

The Light’s glow remained steady. John sighed. It was alive, he was sure of it, but it wasn’t as sentient as he had at first hoped. Its mind seemed about as complex as an amoeba’s.

Seeing no other course of action, he brought it back to his room and wrote up an account of what had happened. That was about all he could do for now. He left the light at his desk and climbed into bed.

He couldn’t sleep all night. The glow from across his room made him feel strangely elated. He felt a tingling in his scalp, a buzzing under the surface of his skin. He gave up and sat at his desk instead, where he laid his head next to the Light and gazed into the flawless, unbroken glow, trying to discern patterns in the random dots that floated before his eyes. Occasionally he would jot something down in that glow. Nothing about the Light itself, just about the feelings that arose in his mind as he looked at it. Perhaps it communicated telepathically—not through thought, but through emotion. He was desperate for _some_ kind of feedback from it.

Near dawn fascination gave way to exhaustion, and his eyes finally closed.

*

John slept through all five alarms the next morning. When he finally looked up, it was 10:30. 30 minutes until he was due to give his speech.

Shit.

He started up a pot of coffee and threw on some clean clothes while it was brewing. No time for breakfast. The sugar in his coffee would have to do. He said goodbye to the Light, whisking a comb through his hair. He was starting to think of it like a pet already. Don’t get attached to strays, his father had said decades ago, when he had tried to make friends with a mangy neighborhood cat. He had never said anything about bonding with alien orbs, though.

He was in such a hurry that he didn’t notice the knobs and cracks growing on his desk, spreading out in a ripple from where the Light lay.

*

He arrived ten minutes before he was due to give the speech, and the person organizing the event gave him a tight-lipped glare before telling him to go do whatever he needed to do to set up. There wasn’t much to do. He hadn’t put much effort into composing this last speech, really. He had been lying about his beliefs for a long time, trying to hide his despair behind unrelenting optimism, but lately it had been getting exhausting. That was one reason why he had decided to quit. If he went on like this much longer, the cracks in his facade would start to show.

Right. This was going to be the last one. John tossed his notes to the side and grinned, earning him another glare from the organizer.

If he wasn’t going to be doing this for a while, then he was going to have fun with it.

John walked out onto the stage to widespread applause. His heart pounded. Every part of him was alert. He felt acutely sensitive to every change in the atmosphere.

It had been a while since he had winged a speech from start to finish and he had forgotten how thrilling it was.

Winging a speech was like building a Jenga pile. You had to be conscious of where you were going while at the same time being aware of all that was behind, to avoid contradicting or repeating yourself. He was building a teetering tower of words that could all come crashing down with a single misplaced sentence. He was playing a game against himself, against time, and against audience expectations. It was so much easier to lie when he thought of speaking as a game, and when he focused on the form of what he was saying, instead of the content. With his skill at oration, he could spin out a whole load of vacant nonsense and still make it sound beautiful and inspirational.

He finished the speech, and gave the audience a significant look. It was a look he had practiced many times. Not too proud, not too needy. The audience immediately broke into applause. They stood. One person in the front row was crying. John smiled, gave them a small bow, and exited the stage.

He chatted briefly with some people backstage and then excused himself a little sooner than was polite. After that speech he felt cut loose, freed. In his elation, he was sure that he couldn’t fail to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Light, and he didn’t want to lose one second in returning to it.

*

The knobs and cracks on his desk had expanded, and now leaves dotted the surface. Roots had grown out of the legs and were questing over the hardwood floor. John remembered how the Light was when he had first found it, with the vegetation growing up around it, unusually dense and healthy.

“You enhance whatever you come in contact with. Okay. I can work with that.”

He had something that was like a universal adapter for magic sources. You put the source in or near the receptor, plugged it into whatever you were trying to power, and if the magic was compatible with the hardware, it would work.

John took the adapter to the front of his house, plugged it into the TV, and set the Light next to it. The adapter sucked the Light in. He half expected it to not work, and was surprised when it lit up in green and let out an affirmative chime. So, this magic wasn’t completely alien. Good to know.

The TV switched on by itself. In the middle of the screen was a white orb; the Light had created a crude, pixelized approximation of itself. As he watched, the definition grew until it looked exactly like the real thing. It was learning how to use the system, he realized. It was adapting.

“Can you show me where we are?”

It began filling out an image of his planet. John smiled.

“I meant this room, but you’re not wrong, I guess.”

The view was centered over his continent. That was what it had “seen” (or however it sensed things) as it was hurtling toward where he had found it. If it knew what his planet looked like from space, then maybe…?

“I want you to show me everything.”

The view zoomed out. It sped past familiar solar systems, galaxies, superclusters—

“No, that’s not it. I’ve seen that before. The universe is very big, I’m very small. I get it. I don’t _like_ it, but I get it.”

John gripped the edges of the TV in frustration.

“I’m not sure how to make you understand me.”

He stared at the image for a minute, trying to figure out how he should phrase this.

“I want you to show me things as they really are.”

The screen flickered. A line moved down the screen. Then another line, and another. It looked like a VCR glitch. The image disintegrated into static with random bursts of color, the colors flickering more and more rapidly until John had to close his eyes, and even then he could see them, so he opened his eyes again and let the colors overwhelm him. They were spreading, bleeding out of the screen. Pixels dripped down the front of it. John reached out to see if he could touch the—the whatever it was, and—

There was an electric pop. The pixels retreated back into the screen with a loud, staticky crack, and at the same time the Light was ejected from the adapter and sent rolling across the floor. John picked up the adapter with shaking hands and had to drop it immediately because it was burning. There was the scent of hot metal and burning plastic in the air, and although the TV looked normal now, it was dark and refused to come back on. John laughed in astonishment and picked up the Light.

“Whatever you were trying to show me, I don’t have anything advanced enough to handle it.”

He thought back to the static and the colors. What kind of image could it have been trying to make out of that?

“But I’ll find a way.”

*

Thinking about the way that the image had tried to escape made him think that maybe it wasn’t the power involved that was the problem, but the medium. It was trying to show him something that couldn’t be depicted through a simple visual alone.

John had a friend in the city who owned a planetarium. The place wasn’t currently open for business, so he was able to convince them to let him use it.

“I’m willing to let you fool around with it, I guess, but why?”

“I, uh, want to use this as a form of mediation, I suppose. That’s why I need to do it alone.”

“Ahh, I see. You’re trying to get in touch with that sublime shit.”

“Yeah, sure. That sublime shit.”

“I don’t know if you’re gonna find that here, but you’re welcome to try. Let me show you how this works.”

Once they were gone John slipped the Light out of his bag. The planetarium was powered by a glowing lavender ball that was about the same size and shape as the Light. He put it to the side and placed his own light in the chamber.

“Let’s start out the same as we did last time. Show me the whole universe.”

Light snaked up the cords that connected the control center to the rest of the complex. It flowed into the walls of the room, and at first he thought that it had left him, but then things in the room began shifting.

The lights went out. It was completely dark, like he was underground. John had never been afraid of the dark, but this was something else. It was almost suffocating. As he stood there, though, he felt the darkness around him shifting. It had a texture, a weight.

He took a step forward.

There was no floor.

He was standing on _something_ , but it wasn’t an even surface. He felt it again, that shifting texture and weight—eddies of darkness, supporting him in a void.

He laughed nervously.

“I’m not sure how you’re doing this but it, uh, looks like we’ve finally found the place for you, yeah?”

Somewhere below him in the void, lights were blinking on. When the group of lights drifted closer to him he saw that they were blinking out and coming to life seemingly at random, and that they were all the time spreading out as the universe expanded.

John scooped up the cluster.

He had the whole universe in his hands. An icy tingle went down his spine. Around him other clusters of lights flared up. This was the multiverse. Billions of little universes floated all around him, spreading off into the distance beyond his sight. After a minute of awed silence, he set his universe adrift among them.

“This is fascinating, but none of it is news to me, exactly. Physicists have been speculating about the multiverse for decades.”

John frowned around at the darkness. He had no idea where the Light was in all this.

“I’m not sure how to make you understand what I’m looking for when even I don’t know what it is.”

He rubbed his eyes.

“What was it that I asked you before? I want you to show me how things actually are. Show me why we’re here. Show me what we’re heading toward. What is this all for?”

The lights flickered out. Colors flashed all around him. They were staticky and glitchy, like the ones on his TV, and for a second he thought that it was going to fail again. Then the darkness returned.

John opened his eyes.

The Light had given him a shift in perspective.

John was a man, but not the same man. He was a man who lived on a planet where the sky was orange and the clouds were red and people spent most of their lives underwater. The Light sped him through this man’s life. He went to school, married two spouses, had his society’s expected 4.5 kids, did all the things you were supposed to do—and died. The Light plunged him into another body. And other. He cycled through the planet’s inhabitants and saw the rise and fall of civilization through their eyes, until they were all dead.

Life began on another planet.

It didn’t get too far this time. Blind, writhing microbes lived in the deep fissures of this planet. Few could survive in the open air. They managed to get as far as the fungal stage before conditions shifted and the planet was never habitable again.

Another planet came.

The lives kept coming.

John saw many, many ends, and began tallying them up.

John was the dying soldier, he was the man awaiting nuclear strike, he was the last human wasting away on a planet far from home. He was more than that, too. He was the planet engulfed by the sun, he was the galaxy being slowly drained by a black hole—and even black holes, the most frightening force in the universe, died eventually.

Everything was loving and fighting and trying so hard and dying and dying and _dying._ Despite the struggle nothing lived, nothing survived for more than a second in the eyes of the universe, and nothing left a trace, nothing had a legacy. Everything was obliterated, and the universe moved on without a care. Try as they might, no living organism could survive this constant flux, and in time even the remains of their remains were gone.

Everything was dying. Forever. Every new form of sentient life that popped up in the multiverse thought that _they_ would be different, that they had it all figured out and they, unlike their predecessors, would survive and thrive. They thought that they would not be subject to mass extinctions or meteorites or the heat death of the sun or their own greed and stupidity. They were all wrong. Every species was doomed from the beginning. The laws of the universe were set against them. It was predestination.

There was a significant part of his notes dedicated to nihilism. He understood the appeal of it, and had bought into it for a while. Nothing means anything. Simple enough. It didn’t take too much effort to understand that. It left something to be desired, though. He couldn’t accept an answer so simple.

But now he saw that the nihilists had gotten close.

Nothing meant anything—but in a purposeful way. The universe was _designed_ to ensure that nothing meant anything. The chaos had a pattern. He had heard of patterns in nature before, like Fibonacci spirals, or tessellations, or fractals. There were theorists who believed that the universe was made of math. That meant that there was already some element of design programmed into nature. Could failure be programmed into it too?

This was an option he had considered, of course, but…he had regarded it as one hypothesis among many. He had tried to take a scientific approach to it, and remain detached from his research.

Now, though, he had undeniable confirmation that all his worst fears were true.

They were all going to die.

It was meaningless.

They were hurtling towards oblivion for no reason.

He forgot that he was John for a while. The information was picking up speed now. As he discerned patterns amid the chaos it all became easier to process, and soon he was experiencing the deaths of entire worlds in only a minute, in half a minute, in five seconds—

It wasn’t until a sharp headache pierced his brain that he was able to remember that somewhere, in a place that seemed far, far away, he had a body.

He found his mouth and managed to choke out one word.

“ _Stop_.”

The scene flickered out instantly.

John was on his hands and knees on the ground, spasms wracking his whole body, his skin covered in cold sweat. His mind felt like it was on fire. He crouched like that for a minute, panting. Then he looked above to where the Light was hovering in the air, awaiting his next instructions.

Maybe he had missed something, in those brief flashes.

 _There_ has _to be something else._

He grabbed the light and shoved it back into the chamber.

"Show me again."

The cycles continued.

Again.

Again.

Again.

He could look at this for hours, he could consider it from every angle, and in the end he would still find—

Nothing.

No hope at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the wait on this chapter, college has been kicking my ass. I can't say when the next chapter will be up, but I've already started it, so hopefully it won't take as long. As always, thanks for reading!


	3. Muse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: heavy drinking

John stayed inside. He ignored calls. He tried to write about what had happened, but every time he put his pen to paper he felt a stab of anxiety so intense that he couldn’t move.

Long days of nothing. Days of thinking but not thinking. Thinking too fast to know what he was thinking about. He felt feverish. He forgot to eat. He remembered to shower, somehow, but he stood staring at the white walls so long that the hot water ran out and he shook with the cold.

Old acquaintances had caught wind of his arrival, and when he ignored their calls they sent him texts and emails. Normally if he wasn’t interested he would graciously decline, but now he glanced at them, thought “who cares,” and moved on.

*

A week passed.

John looked around his bedroom, at the clothes lying crumpled on the floor, at the dust gathering in the corners.

He poked his head outside and was forced to deal with the fact that yes, the outside world still existed, and yes, he still had important friends who were going to be pissed if he didn’t show his face at their cocktail parties.

Plenty of other people had come to the conclusion that everything was utterly fucking pointless and they had gotten on with their lives just fine. What made him special? What gave him the right to mope about it indefinitely?

He could keep it together. John was not the type of person who fell apart. John was calm and collected and smooth-voiced. John was the anchor that kept other people steady. John did not have public mental health breakdowns. These were all facts that everyone knew and agreed upon.

John texted everyone back and told them that he had been in the hospital with pneumonia.

*

One acquaintance had asked him to give a toast at his fundraising party.

John knew that he could do this, because everything was normal and he was fine.

The fundraiser was for building orphanages, or something. The friend had been vague. John got the feeling that it didn’t matter what he said as long as he was the one saying it.

He reluctantly slipped into his old planning ritual. First, the audience. A bunch of rich people, most of them probably old money like the host. He would appeal to their sense of noblesse oblige and pack the toast with hints that they should pat themselves on the back because they were being so gracious by condescending to help these poor orphans.

Gods, when had he gotten so bitter?

 _This is going to be a clusterfuck,_ John thought, but for the first time in his life, he didn’t really care. He was going to be dead and forgotten in a hundred years. Worrying about messing up was pointless.

It would have been a freeing thought if he didn’t feel so empty.

*

It was the evening of the party. John ironed his best suit and ignored the voice in his head that said rumpled suits were ephemera and this party was ephemera and he really ought to stay in bed until the end of time.

Just to spite that voice, he made himself show up early to the party and make small talk with the host while they waited for everyone else to arrive. The crowd grew and he mingled, drawn by the faces of familiar philanthropists. He said charming things and they were charmed. That was the natural order of things. Thirty minutes into the party, he felt as if the planet was tentatively returning to its correct orbit, though the three glasses of champagne he had downed probably had something to do with that.

The host clinked a spoon against his glass and announced that it was time for John to give his toast.

There was a slightly raised area at one edge of this large main room, usually reserved for live bands. John got up on it and looked out over the crowd in their fine eveningwear.

A sharp pain shot through his head, like the pain he had felt in the planetarium. The room swayed, the floor tilted beneath him like a rocking ship, and John’s head tilted with it.

_What the hell am I doing here?_

“Excuse me,” John muttered, and bolted from the room.

He hurried through the halls of the mansion until he found a bathroom, one far enough away from the main room to prevent him from being bothered, and locked himself in it.

He ran the tap and splashed water on his face. For a long time he stared at himself in the mirror, watching the water drip off his nose, studying his white knuckles as his hands gripped the edge of the sink.

There was a sharp rap on the door.

“You okay in there, John?” said his host. “You looked sick.”

John took a deep breath and tried to steady his voice.

“I’ve been having migraines lately. I thought they were getting better, but one hit me just now. Sorry for running off like that.”

“It’s fine.” His tone of voice clearly said that it wasn’t fine. “Feel free to pillage my medicine cabinet.”

“Thank you. Just—tell everyone out there whatever you want, I guess.”

His host walked off down the hall. Back in the main room he said something in a loud voice, which was followed by laughter. John leaned his forehead against the mirror and groaned. The music started up again. John couldn’t make out the words but the base thudded through the house, making everything vibrate slightly. He felt another stab of pain behind his eyes, flung open the medicine cabinet, and scanned the bottles until he found the aspirin.

John shook out two pills and choked them down with a handful of tap water.

Upstairs he found a guest bedroom. Dark, cool, quiet. Far from all the noise. He felt his way across the room until he found the bed and laid down, legs stuck out straight, head propped up. The proper person-recovering-from-illness position.

His phone pinged.

John rubbed his forehead, sighing. It was Meredith.

_You okay?_

He blinked against the screen’s light, momentarily bewildered. Was Meredith here? Had she seen him run off?

Then he saw that his last text had been about the pneumonia. He and Meredith were the type of friends that took days (weeks, months) to respond to each other.

It occurred to him that he could tell Meredith everything, and she would probably believe him.

 _I love you but one day you’re going to die and everyone will forget you and the universe will be totally indifferent_ , he wanted to say.

 _Saying I love you is futile because what’s the point in loving someone if you can’t save them from the relentless march of time_ , he wanted to say.

His finger hovered over the reply button.

 _Slight cough still but otherwise I’m fine_ , he said instead.

*

At this point, John saw only one good option: get hammered on free champagne and leave before anyone could talk to him.

The main room was noisy and crowded, and when he entered it he immediately got the impression that someone was banging a small mallet against his skull. He peered through the crowd. The champagne was being served by a rotating circuit of waiters, who all seemed to be coming from a door on the opposite side of the room. He walked along the edge of the floor, ignoring curious glances from the partygoers, and followed them.

The door led down a hallway and into a kitchen. Inside, waiters retrieved fingerfoods and poured bottles of champagne into glasses before hurrying back to the main room. John brushed past a waiter refilling their tray and grabbed an unopened bottle. They paused mid-pour and stared at him.

“Excuse me, sir, you can’t just—”

He gave them a long look, the “I’m going to make a scene and get you fired” look, and they turned away, pretending to not see him.

He uncorked the bottle, stepped outside, and began drinking.

*

Aside from the occasional glass at parties, John wasn’t in the habit of drinking. It was annoying when he couldn’t think clearly.

Tonight he didn’t want to think about a single damn thing.

He had taken a cab here because he didn’t feel like messing with parking around the mansion, and he was glad of that now. It was a perfect excuse to drink and walk. His home was within about two hours walking distance from here, assuming that he didn’t get lost in the dark. He lived in the second-nicest neighborhood in town. He kept telling himself he wasn’t like those rich assholes because he wasn’t _that_ rich, but, well…he certainly wasn’t hurting. He hadn’t grown up with money. It was hard to know what to think about it now that he had it.

John walked under the streetlamps, taking occasional swigs from the bottle, trying to not think about this and other things. One time Sidney and Meredith had egged some houses out here. John had only watched, refusing to throw one, saying that he didn’t want to get arrested and lose his scholarship. They had gone by the houses on bikes, Meredith and John both tipsy, John riding on the back of Sidney’s bike, heart pounding, afraid every second that he was going to fall off. Sidney never drank, only smoked. His parents had trouble with it, he said. Not worth the risk.

John shook his head and took a long pull on the bottle. He was growing nostalgic. Another sign that he was getting too old.

He emerged into the city proper. It was still fairly busy even at this hour, and he passed people on the street occasionally, faces indistinguishable in the dark, too intent on getting home safely to pay attention to a solitary drinker. He felt anonymous, for once. He wasn’t ultra-famous—the paparazzi seemed much more interested in going after movie stars than going after public speakers, thank god—but every once in a while someone recognized his face. Without that recognizability, it was like a layer of his identity had been peeled away. He wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.

The alcohol fully kicked in halfway through the bottle (this was some weak stuff, more fizz than anything), and with it came the sluggishness and his usual annoyance at the sluggishness. It was becoming hard to put one foot in front of the other.

John found a stretch of sidewalk relatively free of trash and sat on the curb, long legs positioned at odd angles in front of him, watching the cars speed past. He couldn’t remember the last time he had done this, just meandered through a city with no purpose. Other people may have found this refreshing, but the lack of purpose weighed him down. He felt as if some thick heavy thing lay coiled in his stomach, making him ill.

Thoughts rose up despite his efforts, but they felt distant, with the illusion of objectivity that drunkenness brought.

He couldn’t go back to who he was, that much he was sure of.

What did that leave him with, then?

He put the bottle down and tried to look at his hands, _really_ look at them, though it was hard to focus now. No, he wasn’t actually a different person. He was still the same man, with the same past, with the same position. It was just that his perspective of those things had been completely flipped upside down. What he chose to do with this new perspective was up to him.

He took another long drink, and when at last he broke the silence his voice was slow and emphatic:

“I have…no fucking idea.”

He drank the rest of the bottle right there and tossed it into the nearest dumpster. Mercifully, he was no longer capable of intelligent thought, and as he dragged himself home he wasn’t troubled by anything stronger than dehydration and a vague sense of dread.

At home he stumbled to the couch and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

*

When John woke up the next morning, he felt different. It wasn’t just the hangover. It was the relief that came with being on the other side of a failure, of knowing that you didn’t have to try the failed thing again. He would never give another motivational speech, he knew, and he wouldn’t be able to teach philosophy either, not when he knew that every great thinker of the past had been wrong. His future wasn’t clear, but he had eliminated those paths, at least.

He peered ahead, trying to see other paths. Two unfurled in front of him. He could either let himself waste away in this house alone, or he could reach out and try to make everyone understand what he had learned.

He couldn’t do the former. John smiled grimly. It was amazing how far the good old self-preservation instinct could carry a person.

John peeled himself off the couch, wincing, and went to his room to find a change of clothes. The Light glowed at him from the desk, where it had sat undisturbed for days. Over the past week he had slowly developed feelings of fear and revulsion toward it, and even now, in his relatively clear-headed state, he shuddered when he looked at it. His gaze passed from it to the bookshelf.

All those years of research, wasted.

He got up and grabbed one of the notebooks and, feeling the weight of all those useless words in his hand, had a sudden urge to burn all his books, to purge himself of those lost years and start fresh.

These were just the most recent journals. In a box under his bed were the ones from decades ago, reaching all the way back to college. He grabbed the first one and was surprised to find, next to the neat black ink, colorful notes in the margins.

The first one: _this all sounds like horseshit to me._

It was Sidney.

John grinned in spite of himself. Sidney had been as idealistic as John was, but John’s obsessive bookishness had frustrated him to no end.

He flipped to the last page, where Sidney had written, in bright orange, _GO OUTSIDE JOHN_.

John glanced up at the morning light slanting through the cracks in the blinds. Maybe Sidney was right.

He put the journal back with the others.

Last week he had kept trying to describe his experience and always failed. Maybe it was time for a refresher. He picked up the Light and gave it a wry look.

“Looks like we’re not done dealing with each other yet,” he said, and sighed. “I suppose it wasn’t your fault. This is what I wanted. I shouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know.”

As John stared into the glow, he shivered. It had no idea what it had done to him, but somehow, that made it more unnerving. It had the power to wreck him, and it didn’t even care.

Still. It was probably better to know than to spend the rest of his life searching.

*

His friend gave him a funny look when he asked them to just give him a key to the planetarium, but they humored him.

There was something menacing in this space now. The shadows seemed deeper. The air was heavy with the knowledge of what was about to happen. Maybe he had corrupted the room somehow, after doing that.

John put the Light in its receptacle and sat down on the thin carpet, crossed-legged, a notebook in his lap and a pen in hand.

“Show me.”

The initial wave was as shocking as it had been the first time, and he struggled to avoid being swept away in the tide of information. The sharp point of his pen, pressed against his palm, brought him back to some level of bodily awareness. He raised his thumb to his mouth, feeling as if he were moving someone else’s hand, and bit it.

The notebook in his lap floated into view. It was dim, and he still had the feeling that he wasn’t operating his own body, but he could move now. He wrote sluggishly. The visions that the Light was showing him seemed real while the outside world was a dream, one of those dreams where you can’t move quickly now matter how hard you try.

It worked, though.

Looking was easier this time, since he knew what to expect. He felt as if his mind was growing calluses against the visions.

This was how it was. He couldn’t change that. There was no use in being upset, no use in trembling before it all as he had done before.

He felt a numbness in his chest, accompanied by a cold sort of lucidity, that would become familiar over the following months.

*

Over the next week he essentially lived in the planetarium. He found it easier to write there, in the place where it had happened.

It was hard to wrestle all his thoughts about this into a single speech. Hell, it was hard to even form coherent thoughts about it at all. He had feelings, and those feelings had shapes, but he didn’t know how to assign words to them. Somehow, though, he managed, and after another week he had created something passable. He still wasn’t satisfied with it, but this seemed to be as good as it was going to get.

Now he just had to find an audience for the thing. He smirked, imagining what his pitch would sound like. He wasn’t so far gone that he expected this slice of gloom and doom to be well-received by everyone.

Maybe he could test it on a small audience, just to see what happened. He remembered thinking that Meredith would hear him out. She might laugh at him, but when it came down to it he could trust her to be honest.

Meredith came over at noon the next day. He let her in and she looked around curiously as she took off her coat. He had cleaned up the place before she arrived, but most of his things remained in boxes, and it was obvious that he had tried to hide them by shoving them into a corner. She raised her eyebrows at them, but didn’t comment.

“So. You wanted to test out some words on me?”

He nodded. “Go sit on that bar stool and try to pretend that we’re in an auditorium.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “Okay.”

She sat at the bar, smoothed her skirt, and sat up straight. Mockingly straight.

He sighed.

“Please try to take this seriously.”

“Me? Not taking something seriously? Really, John.”

He shook his head, tried to pretend that she wasn’t smirking at him, and began.

Usually John paced when he spoke, but this time he stood still, as if nailed in place by the gravity of what he was saying. Meredith was an expressive listener. It didn’t take long for the humor to die in her eyes. At first she looked intrigued, but as the speech wore on and she realized that there was going to be no shift, no moment when he refuted all that came before, her interest was replaced by confusion and worry.

He finished. She was silent for a while.

“Well?”

“I don’t know what to say, John.”

“Please, don’t hold back. Be as harsh as you need to be.”

“Okay. Well. You sound like a conspiracy theorist with depression.”

“I don’t have depression.”

“But you don’t deny the conspiracy theorist part.”

John leaned against the opposite counter and crossed his arms.

“I know it sounds out there, but I thought my arguments were solid. I mean, as solid as they can be for theoretical cosmology.”

She put her elbows on the bar, chin in hands, and frowned.

“Paranoid tone aside, throwing out some physics terminology isn’t gonna fool anyone into believing you for long.”

“What does it need, then?”

She shook her head. “I can’t help you with this one.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t believe a word of it. Because it goes against everything you’ve ever promoted. Why did you write this, John?”

John picked a piece of lint off his suit, frowning, wishing that she would stop making this about him and realize the broader implications of what he had said.

“I’ve realized some things recently,” he said, flatly.

“What things?”

“Did you even listen to the speech?”

She huffed.

“I meant, like, what made you start thinking about this stuff?”

He shrugged. The Light was in his room. He had locked the door, just in case.

“No offense, but I think that you should talk to someone. It sounds like you’re going through some kind of mid-life crisis.”

He winced. “Really, Meredith?”

“It’s happens to everyone. You get old, you start thinking about death, that sort of thing. I’ve started thinking about all of that more too.”

“This is different.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Whatever you say.” She stood up and rolled her shoulders with a cracking of joints. “I was going to demand some dinner in return for my services, but all that existentialism curbed my appetite.”

He secretly felt relieved. The idea of wasting an hour socializing irritated him, even if it was with his best friend. He needed to get back to work.

“Another time,” he said.

He helped her back into her coat and saw her off.

An odd, dull pain bloomed in his chest as he watched her get into her car, and he realized that he would never be able to talk to her like this again. He had called her here not only to get advice, but to say goodbye.

Where he was going, he didn’t want anyone to follow. They would only weigh him down.

*

Their meeting hadn’t been entirely unproductive. He had gotten something valuable: the response of a typical audience member.

Obviously, this speech wasn’t hitting the right note.

He could see where he may have gone wrong. He had tried to remove his own feelings from it, to make it seem objective and based on factual arguments, to make it seem less like he was “a conspiracy theorist with depression,” as Meredith had said. He had tried to sound scientific by focusing on the patterns he had observed, though he had not, of course, mentioned the specifics of the planes themselves.

Back at his desk, he sat down and drew a big X over what he had written. It was time for a different approach, but what kind?

His arm brushed against the Light. He was about to push it away when a new idea occurred to him.

The Light enhanced things. It invented new purposes for them. Rhetoric was a type of invention, right?

As he thought this, looking at the Light, he felt it pull at him. He had felt it tug at him before as he wrote, but had always ignored it, assuming that it just wanted him to use it for the same thing again. Now he stared into it, letting its glow soothe his mind.

He set it next to his blank notepad and picked up his pen. Nothing happened. He prodded it, shrugged, and began writing freely, just letting the thoughts flow out in a stream. When he had been going for a while, long enough to lose himself in the flow, fine tendrils spiraled out from the Light. They coiled around his pen and encircled his arm up the shoulder.

The thoughts kept coming. They were all thoughts he had had before, but new connections were forming, as if the Light was binding them together. Soon, a structure emerged.

He realized that he wasn’t really writing a speech.

He was writing a story.

It was a story of struggle. And failure. And futility. John drew on examples from the fantastic worlds he had seen, casting aside the pretense of theory. He made it a grand epic, an epic they were all, each and every one of them, tangled up in. It was an _exciting_ tale. This required passion. He needed the audience to understand his anger. Righteous anger. John grinned. He had never thought of himself as righteous before. In the past, he would have loathed to use the word.

Now, he kind of liked it.

*

“Tonight,” John said, pacing across the stage. “I’m going to tell you a story.”

He paused and smiled, and there was something self-effacing in it, acknowledging the absurdity of what he was about to say.

“The story of everything.”

No more lies. No more fooling everyone into thinking that anything could change. These were the most important words he had ever spoken; these words were the truth.

It was the easiest speech he had ever given. The words flowed out of him effortlessly and it was as if he had tapped into some wellspring of inspiration that had been inside him all along, just waiting to be unblocked. This was what he had always believed, he realized. He had only refused to accept it out of some foolish hope.

He was a fool no longer, and he swore that he never would be again. He looked out over the crowd with pity and a sort of affectionate disgust. It was partially disgust at himself. He had blinded them over and over, telling them that if they just worked hard everything would be okay, that their small petty lives were worth something. If he was the one that had deluded them, then he would be the one that saved them.

He let himself get passionate. It worked. In the eyes of the audience he saw at least a faint reflection of his own anger. All of them, even John, were swept away in his tragic multiverse-spanning tale.

Weaving spells into a speech was considered unethical and John had never done it, but as he spoke he felt as if he had tapped into some strange new form of magic. The words had a rhythm like poetry, a thundering, furious rhythm. He was dizzy with anger. He felt possessed.

It was incredible.

As the speech came to a close, a ripple of light went over the crowd, black interspersed with shimmering colors. It was faint and brief. He could have blinked and missed it.

Just a trick of the light, he was sure.

The audience clapped, uncertainly at first, not sure that such a speech merited celebration. There were a few people, though, who were frozen in place, staring at nothing with cold fury in their eyes.

If his message had reached even a few, then this was worth it.

This was what he had been made for.


End file.
